One week with Apple’s CarPlay

If you buy a car today, it will probably come with some kind of touchscreen computer onboard. These are basically embedded tablet computers that run some kind of operating system, but rather than coming from Apple, Google, or Microsoft, the software comes from car manufacturers and their suppliers. Car companies don't have a ton of experience when it comes to software, so the integrated computers generally aren't designed very well. They also never have the app ecosystem we've come to expect from smartphones and tablets, so it's no surprise that many people still prefer using their smartphones over the in-car option.

Traditional software companies are getting a foothold in cars, though. We already reviewed Android Auto, and recently we got to spend some time with Apple's CarPlay. CarPlay seeks to combine the benefits of the in-car system—namely the big, bright touchscreen—with the design, apps, and functionality of iOS. Plug an iPhone into a supported vehicle and the stock infotainment system will go away while the iPhone beams an iOS-style interface to the car screen. From our time with CarPlay, this system appears built from the ground up for computing on the go, with an easy-to-use, safety-focused UI, a heavy emphasis on voice commands, and a sliver of the huge iOS app ecosystem.

To run CarPlay in your vehicle, you'll need a compatible car (Apple has a list here) or an aftermarket radio. Phone-wise, you'll need an iPhone 5/5c or newer. CarPlay updates come up fairly frequently, but this is CarPlay as it exists in iOS 9.2.

The Basics

CarPlay is a "casted" interface—all the processing happens on the iPhone, but it uses the car screen as an external monitor. You plug in the iPhone and tap an icon on the car's stock infotainment system, then the infotainment system goes away and Apple's software commandeers the screen. Audio, touch, and voice commands get beamed to the car, and all the physical controls on the steering wheel and console switch to controlling CarPlay instead of the stock system. It can even invoke Siri by holding down the voice command button. And if the car doesn't have a touchscreen, physical controls are an option, too.

Having everything run on your phone makes CarPlay easy for Apple to update—it just ships an iOS update for CarPlay the same way it would for any other feature. Car manufacturers can build CarPlay integration into their vehicles and then get out of the way, allowing Apple to ship software updates.

The Hardware

Generally, one of Apple's biggest strengths is its full control of hardware and software. But for the first time in a long time, Apple doesn't control all of the hardware for a product. Maybe someday the Apple Car will become a reality, but for now the car's embedded monitor and touchscreen is provided by the car manufacturer, and that can lead to a sub-par experience. For instance, the touchscreen in our test car (a 2016 Chevy Impala) was awful.

Despite Apple popularizing capacitive touchscreens with the launch of the original iPhone in 2007, car companies haven't necessarily learned from that. Our Chevy naturally came with a resistive touchscreen. It looks and feels like a touchscreen from a stylus-equipped Palm Pilot or Pocket PC right down to the "calibrate touchscreen" option that requires you to press little targets in the corners of the screen. Resistive touchscreens rely on pressure to press two layers of the screen together, which registers a touch, while capacitive just senses the conductivity of your finger and doesn't require any pressure. The pressure requirement makes the screens more finicky than the smartphones and tablets that we're used to. Swiping to scrolling was frequently misinterpreted as a tap, taps would frequently go unregistered, and in general the system wasn't up to par.

Ultimately, we wanted this time to look at the software, so we won't let the 2006-era touchscreen color our impressions of CarPlay. But we're mentioning this as a warning: don't trust the car manufacturers to get it right. Make sure your touchscreen is from this decade. (We know OEMs are skittish about letting Apple and Google into their car systems, but maybe once such companies get a stronger foothold, Apple could impose some touchscreen standards on the car manufacturers?)

The Interface

The interface is a bit of a departure from iOS on a phone or tablet. It's still very icon-centric, but Apple has morphed the status bar into a thick vertical strip that sits on the left side of the display. Apple's trademark home button is rendered in software, and it lives at the bottom of the status bar. The time, Wi-Fi, and cellular connectivity are in the center. The top of the bar is blank except when you're running Apple Maps. If Maps is navigating in the background, its icon will appear at the top of the status bar. With Maps in the foreground, you'll get the cardinal direction. The bar ends up being a status bar, navigation bar, and task bar all rolled into one.

Apple's choice to go with an icon-grid home screen screams "iOS," and the 4×2 icon grid on an 8-inch screen results in massive icons that are dead simple to use. You end up bouncing from app to home screen to app a lot, though, which is less than ideal while driving. The faster alternative is having always-on tabs at the bottom of the screen for things like maps, phone, and media, which is the design style used by Android Auto and Ford Sync 3. That tabbed design allows you to jump from any major function to any other major function in a single tap.

If you install some third-party apps and get more than eight icons, the screen will scroll horizontally like an iOS home screen. In that case, everything moves up a small amount to make way for the pagination dots. For cars without touchscreens, left and right arrows appear as an alternative to swiping. You can't move icons around the way you can on iOS, though—third party apps will be alphabetized, which means your favorite app might end up on page two. Again, extra taps like this are kind of a bummer in a car, where you'd prefer everything to be as fast and simple as possible.

Luckily, most of the additional phone and tablet controls have been simplified. There's no notification panel, control center, or multitasking view on CarPlay. You will still get notifications for CarPlay-compatible apps, which drop down from the top of the screen like on iOS. You won't be notified of e-mails, but you will get your calls, texts, map directions, and reminders. Red notification badges show up on the icons, too.

If you don't want to tap your way to a task, Siri is along for the ride. Siri is worlds better than most of the in-car voice systems we've tried. Like on iOS, it can handle a full command like "navigate to [point of interest]." In the smartphone world, this is barely worth mentioning, but in a car, this is usually a three-step process: you specify that you want to ask about a point of interest, then the city where the point of interest is, then the name of the point of interest.

Siri does a good job of integrating with the car hardware. You can bring up the voice prompt by long-pressing the steering wheel voice button or long-pressing the on-screen home button. When the voice prompt kicks in, the car audio gets turned down and so does the HVAC system. This gives Siri a nice, clear voice input to try to decipher.

Most of the interface does not have a "night" mode, but Apple takes a dark approach to just about everything (so a palette swap feels unnecessary). Icons, album art, and contact pictures are the only objects that would inject some bright colors into the UI. Even then, when Album Art is used for the background it is blurred and darkened to not blind the driver at night. The lone "bright" app is Apple Maps, which will make the majority of the screen the tan map background color. That's a little too bright at night, so Maps is the only app with a night mode that automatically kicks in based on the time of day.

CarPlay is surprisingly minimal. Out of the box your functions are Phone calls, Maps, Messages, and playing some kind of audio, which gets a whopping four icons: Music, Podcasts, Audiobooks, and Now Playing. There really are no settings for the apps or any significant system settings for CarPlay. You get the app icons, Siri, and that's it. That's obviously not the entire functionality of a car computer, so you'll still need to rely on the car software for things like the AM/FM/XM radio, climate control, settings, and any other car hardware integration.

Car companies have mentioned that CarPlay's video functionality is based on H.264, which has led many to believe it's an offshoot of AirPlay. The expected way to use CarPlay is to plug in your phone, turn off the phone screen, and then forget about it, but leaving the iPhone screen on reveals a little about how CarPlay works. Everything that happens on the CarPlay screen also happens on the iPhone screen—open Apple Maps through the car screen and it will also open on the iPhone. The reverse is also true—you can use the iPhone screen as a remote control for CarPlay.

The two experiences aren't exact copies, though. CarPlay runs the CarPlay interface, while the iPhone follows along by rendering the standard iOS interface, presumably allowing it to generate the necessary data to beam to the alternative CarPlay UI. This is in contrast to Android Auto, which fires up a ton of background processes and leaves the phone screen independent from the car display.

We still needed to plug the iPhone into the car with a USB cable. "Wireless CarPlay" is supposed to be a thing as of iOS 8.3, but as far as we can tell an end-to-end solution doesn't exist yet. According to Car and Driver, Volkswagen built a compatible car and planned to demo wireless CarPlay at CES 2016, but Apple shut it down. The cable does have some benefits, though—you get to charge the phone while using CarPlay. The battery life would be the biggest concern for a wireless version.